News

This is a list of upcoming events, professional opportunities and trainings, and funding opportunities related to the mental health and wellness of African Americans in the Austin area. Have news you would like us to share? Please contact Vicky Coffee, Program Manager for the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health.

Note: 4ABHN members are deeply involved with the Central Texas African American Family Support Conference. Learn more.

Please join Dr. Patricia L. Pickles as she celebrates her birthday and reveals her new book educating about mental illness.

In her new book, Chronic Mental Illness...A Living Nightmare shares a plea for compassion, better understanding, and more funding to help those with mental illness and their caregivers. Eace Bee was a promising young student hoping to become an architect or a rapper when, nearing the end of high school, he was, by his own account, stwruck down by crippling mental illness. Diagnosed with severe paranoid schizophrenia, he has for 20-plus years struggled with mood swings that can make him seem menacing, voices from animate and inanimate objects that only he can hear, and behavior patterns that have put him into hospitals again and again. His propensity for not taking his meds hasn't helped. In this unusual book edited by Pickles, Eace; his mother, Priscilla Bee; and his sister, Honey Bee, all debut authors, tell their intimate story of the sheer horror and stigma of mental illness. Priscilla-a teacher and school administrator and a member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness- calls for substantial increases in public spending to train mental health professionals, teachers, counselors, administrators, police, and others who come in contact with mentally ill or at-risk young people. For Eace, she says, what is so obviously required is long-term comprehensive care in an open and supportive environment. But her search for such a program has yielded disappointing results. Instead, the care Eace receives has been episodic, disjointed, not especially compassionate, and too often complicated by bureaucratic quagmires. Her point...that the historic malady of racism has infected treatment of the mentally ill is well made. Chronic Mental Illness...A Living Nightmare succeeds in helping to illuminate the realities of mental illness, what it does to families, and how it is treated-or mistreated.